Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach

First published Mon Dec 9, 2013

For a number of years in the mid-nineteenth century Ludwig Feuerbach
(1804–1872) played an important role in the history of post-Hegelian
German philosophy, and in the transition from idealism to various forms
of naturalism, materialism and positivism that is one of the most
notable developments of this period. To the extent that he is
remembered today by non-specialists in the history of
nineteenth-century religious thought, it is mainly as the object of
Marx’s criticism in his famous Theses on Feuerbach,
originally penned in 1845 and first published posthumously by Friedrich
Engels as an appendix to his book, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of
Classical German Philosophy (Engels, 1888). Although never without
his admirers, who included several leading popularizers of scientific
materialism in the second half the nineteenth century (cf. Gregory,
1977), Feuerbach’s public influence declined rapidly after the
failed revolution of 1848/49 (in approximately inverse proportion to
the rising popularity of Schopenhauer). Renewed philosophical
attention paid to him in the middle of the twentieth century is largely
attributable to the publication, beginning in the late 1920s, of
Marx’s early philosophical manuscripts, including The German
Ideology, which revealed the extent of Feuerbach’s influence
on Marx and Engels during the period culminating in the composition of
that historic work (1845–46).

Apart from this influence, and the continuing interest of his work
as a theorist of religion, Feuerbach’s importance for the history
of modern philosophy is also due to the fact that the publication of
The Essence of Christianity in 1841 can be taken, as it was by
Engels, to symbolically mark the end of the period of classical German
philosophy that had begun sixty years earlier with the appearance of
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason—though some might
want to question the assumption involved in this way of putting things
that classical German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system that
Engels thought of Feuerbach as having overthrown. In any case,
Feuerbach’s biography and the trajectory of his thinking are both
closely intertwined with political and intellectual developments in the
period referred to by historians as the Vormärz, which
extends from
1830–1848.[1]
Although he remained unable to bring to fruition the “philosophy
of the future,” the aphoristically formulated
“principles” of which he attempted to set out in 1843, the
emphases in his later essays on corporeality, the senses, finitude,
inter-subjectivity, and drive psychology introduced into the history of
modern thought themes developed further by Marx, Freud, Nietzsche,
Martin Buber, Karl Löwith, Maurice Merleu-Ponty and Alfred
Schmidt, among others.

Ludwig was the third son of the distinguished jurist, Paul Johann
Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach. His nephew, the neo-classical
painter, Anselm Feuerbach, was the son of Ludwig’s older brother,
also called Anselm, himself a classical archaeologist and aesthetician
“in the spirit of Lessing and
Winckelmann.”[2]
Ludwig’s father, who studied
philosophy and law at Jena in the 1790s with the Kantians, Karl
Reinhold and Gottlieb Hufeland, respectively, belonged to a group of
distinguished northern German scholars called to Bavaria during the
period of administrative reform under Maximilian Montgelas, and charged
with the task of modernizing the legal and educational institutions of
what became in 1806 the modern kingdom of Bavaria. Other members
of this group of Nordlichter or “northern lights”
included F. I. Niethammer, F. H. Jacobi (the godfather of
Ludwig’s younger brother, Friedrich), and Friedrich Thiersch (the
tutor of Ludwig’s two oldest brothers, who has sometimes been
called “the Humboldt of Bavaria”). P. J. A. Feuerbach
was knighted in recognition of his achievement in modernizing of the
Bavarian penal code, though his political influence was dramatically
curtailed as a result of outspoken national-liberal criticisms of
Napoleon expressed in pamphlets he published in 1813 and 1814.

Raised Protestant and religiously devout in his youth, Ludwig
matriculated in the theological faculty of the University of Heidelberg
in 1823, where his father hoped he would come under the influence of
the late rationalist theologian, H. E. G. Paulus. Ludwig was won over
instead by the speculative theologian, Karl Daub, who had been
instrumental in bringing Hegel to Heidelberg for two years in 1816, and
was by this time one of the foremost theologians of the Hegelian
school. By 1824 Ludwig had secured his father’s grudging
permission to transfer to Berlin under the pretext of wanting to study
with the theologians Friedrich Schleiermacher and August Neander, but
in fact because of his growing infatuation with Hegel’s
philosophy. Feuerbach’s matriculation at Berlin was delayed
because of suspicions of his involvement in the politically subversive
student fraternity (Burschenschaft) movement, in which two of
his older brothers were active, as a result of which one of them (Karl,
a talented mathematician) was imprisoned and subsequently attempted
suicide. In 1825, to his father’s consternation, Ludwig
transferred to the philosophical faculty, thereafter hearing within a
two-year period all of Hegel’s lectures except for those on
aesthetics, repeating the lectures on logic
twice.[3]

Shortly after defending his Latin dissertation, De ratione, una,
universali, infinita, at Erlangen in 1828 Feuerbach began to
lecture on the history of modern philosophy at the conservative
university there, many of whose faculty were closely associated with
the neo-Pietist Awakening, and, in the case of Julius Friedrich Stahl,
who would go on to become a leading theorist of conservatism, also with
the so-called “positive philosophy” of the late
Schelling. The scathingly satirical and even vulgar couplets
(Xenien) directed against the Pietists that Feuerbach appended
to his first book, Thoughts on Death and Immortality (1830,
hereafter Thoughts; see Section 2 below), which he published
anonymously in 1830, effectively destroyed his prospects for an
academic career.

During the 1830s Feuerbach published three books on the history of
modern philosophy, in addition to several essays and reviews.
These include the History of Modern Philosophy from Bacon to
Spinoza (1833), History of Modern Philosophy: Presentation,
Development, and Critique of the Leibnizian Philosophy (1837), and
Pierre Bayle: A Contribution to the History of Philosophy and
Humanity (1838), none of which have been translated into
English. The first of them won him the praise of Edward Gans and
an invitation to contribute reviews to the Annals for Scientific
Criticism, the principal journal of the Hegelian academic
establishment in Berlin. In these reviews Feuerbach defended the
Hegelian philosophy vigorously against critics such as Karl
Bachmann. Even after the publication of the works on Leibniz and
Bayle, however, he was refused an academic appointment. He was
able for several decades to sustain his existence as an independent
scholar in the remote Frankish village of Bruckberg by virtue of his
wife, Bertha Löw, having been partial heir of a porcelain factory
located there, from a modest pension due to his father’s service
to Bavaria, and from publishing royalties.

The event that precipitated the gradual dissolution of the Hegelian
synthesis of faith and knowledge that Marx and Engels later referred to
sardonically as the “putrefaction of absolute spirit” was
the publication in two volumes in 1835–36 of D. F. Strauss’s
Life of Jesus Critically Examined. Here Strauss used the
tools of the “higher criticism” he had acquired from his
Tübingen teacher, F. C. Baur, to reveal the historical
unreliability of the accounts of the life of Jesus preserved in the
canonical gospels, and interpreted the doctrine of the incarnation of
Christ as a mythological expression of the philosophical truth of the
identity of the divine spirit and the human species (conceived as the
community of finite spirits existing throughout history, and not as the
historical individual, Jesus of Nazareth). The appearance of
Strauss’s book confirmed the suspicions of theological
conservatives like E. W. Hengstenberg and Heinrich Leo that
Hegel’s philosophy, despite its use of Christian terminology, is
incompatible with the historical faith, and the editors of the Berlin
Annals felt compelled to publically discredit Strauss’s Hegelian
credentials. It was in the wake of these events that Arnold Ruge
established the Halle Annals for German Science and Art, which
served for several years as the principal literary organ of the Young
Hegelians, and to which Feuerbach began to contribute essays and
reviews in 1838, including in 1839 an essay entitled “Toward a
Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy,” in which he first began to
distance himself publically from the Hegelian cause, calling for a
“return to nature”—and to a naturalistic explanation
of the mysteries of Christianity, and of religion
more
generally.[4]

Feuerbach achieved the height of his brief literary fame with the
publication in 1841 of The Essence of Christianity, which was
translated into English by the novelist, Mary Anne Evans (a.k.a. George
Eliot), who also translated Strauss’s Life of
Jesus. Engels recalled the appearance of Feuerbach’s
book as having a profoundly “liberating effect” on him and
Marx by “breaking the spell” of the Hegelian system, and
establishing the truths that human consciousness is the only
consciousness or spirit that exists, and that it is dependent upon the
physical existence of human beings as part of nature (Engels, 1888,
12–13). In 1844 Marx wrote to Feuerbach, with reference to the
latter’s Principles of the Philosophy of the Future
(1843; hereafter Principles) and The Essence of Faith
According to Luther (1844), that in them he had, intentionally or
not, “given socialism a philosophical foundation”
(GW, v. 18, p. 376). In fact, Feuerbach was only then
beginning to acquaint himself with socialist ideas through his reading
of authors like Lorenz von Stein and Wilhelm Weitling. In the end
he declined Marx’s request for a contribution to the
German-French Annals, as well as Ruge’s urging that he
become more politically engaged. He did come out of rural
seclusion to observe fairly passively the ultimately disappointing
events in Frankfurt in 1848, and to deliver a series of public lectures
at Heidelberg beginning the same year. He unfortunately failed to
develop with much specificity or argumentative rigor the
“philosophy of the future” for which he himself called in
the early 1840s, continuing instead to focus his attention mainly on
religion in works like The Essence of Religion (1845),
Lectures on the Essence of Religion (1851), and
TheogonyAccording to the Sources of Classical, Hebrew and
Christian Antiquity (1857). The five years of philological
labor that Feuerbach invested in the latter work, which he considered
his crowning achievement, went largely unnoticed both by his
contemporaries and by posterity.

During the 1840s Feuerbach corresponded and occasionally visited and
maintained close personal relationships with several leading German
radicals, including, in addition to Ruge and Marx, the publishers Otto
Lüning, Otto Wigand, and Julius Fröbel; the revolutionary
poet, Georg Herwegh, and his wife, Emma; Hermann Kriege, a freelance
activist and early German socialist who emigrated to America; and
scientific materialists like Jacob Moleschott and Carl Vogt. The
impression made by him on several leading lights of the younger
generation is reflected in the Gottfried Keller’s
Bildungsroman, Green Henry, first published in 1855,
and in the dedication (to Feuerbach) of Richard Wagner’s early
book, The Art-Work of the Future (1850).

Partly as the result of a global financial crisis, the porcelain
factory that had supported Feuerbach’s literary existence went
bankrupt in 1859. The following year he and his wife and daughter
were forced to relocate to the village of Rechenberg, located then on
the outskirts of Nuremberg, where Feuerbach lived out the remainder of
his life under severely strained financial circumstances and in
increasingly ill health. Although his productivity as a writer
declined sharply during this period, he was able to bring out in 1866
the tenth and final volume of his collected works (which had begun to
appear in 1846), bearing the title God, Freedom and Immortality
from the Standpoint of Anthropology, and including a fairly
substantial, though fragmentary, essay “On Spiritualism and
Materialism, Especially in Relation to the Freedom of the
Will.” In this essay, and in an essay on ethics that
Feuerbach left incomplete at his death, we find him beginning to sketch
out a moral psychology and an eudaimonistic ethical theory in which the
concept of the “drive-to-happiness”
(Glückseligkeitstrieb) plays a central role.

In an essay published in 1835 Heinrich Heine observed that pantheism
had by this time become “the secret religion
of
Germany.”[5]
That
Feuerbach is generally remembered as an atheist and a materialist has
tended to obscure the fact that he began his philosophical career as an
enthusiastic adherent of this philosophical religion, one early
expression of which can be found in the Greek words “Hen kai
Pan” (One and All) inscribed in 1791 by Hölderlin in
Hegel’s student album from Tübingen (cf. Pinkard,
2000,
32).[6]
This inscription is
an allusion to words uttered by Lessing after reading Goethe’s
poem-fragment, “Prometheus,” and responding
enthusiastically by declaring himself a Spinozist, according to the
account contained in Jacobi’s famous Letters on the Doctrine
of Spinoza (1785; cf. Jacobi, 1994, 187). It was the publication
of these letters that set off the original Pantheism Controversy, and
had the unintended effect of leading more than one generation of young
German poets and thinkers to regard Spinoza no longer as a “dead
dog” and a godless atheist, but rather as the God-intoxicated
sage of a pantheistic creed in which those who, like Lessing, could no
longer “stomach” orthodox conceptions of the divinity that
make a strict distinction between creator and creation, could seek to
satisfy their spiritual aspirations. Feuerbach included several
verses of the Prometheus-fragment as an epigram to his first book, in
which he used the tools of Hegelian logic to develop a view of the
divinity as One and All along lines laid out by Spinoza, Giordano Bruno
and Jacob Boehme. These three he hailed as “pious
God-inspired sages […] Who prophetically laid the ground for the
feast of reconciliation [between nature and spirit that it is] the task
of the modern age [to celebrate]” (GTU 241/48,
463/214). But this reconciliation, he argued, cannot occur as
long as God continues to be thought of as an individual person existing
independently of the world.

That Feuerbach, unlike Strauss, never accepted Hegel’s
characterization of Christianity as the consummate religion is clear
from the contents of a letter he sent to Hegel along with his
dissertation in
1828.[7]
In
this letter he identified the historical task remaining in the wake of
Hegel’s philosophical achievement to be the establishment of the
“sole sovereignty of reason” in a “kingdom of the
Idea” that would inaugurate a new spiritual dispensation.
Foreshadowing arguments put forward in his first book, Feuerbach
went on in this letter to emphasize the need for “the I, the self
in general, which especially since the beginning of the Christian era,
has ruled the world and has thought of itself as the only spirit that
exists at all [to be] cast down from its royal
throne.”[8]
This, he
proposed, would require prevailing ways of thinking about time, death,
this world and the beyond, individuality, personhood and God to be
radically transformed within and beyond the walls of academia.

Feuerbach made his first attempt to challenge prevailing ways of
thinking about individuality in his inaugural dissertation, where he
presented himself as a defender of speculative philosophy against those
critics who claim that human reason is restricted to certain limits
beyond which all inquiry is futile, and who accuse speculative
philosophers of having transgressed these. This criticism, he
argued, presupposes a conception of reason is a cognitive faculty of
the individual thinking subject that is employed as an instrument for
apprehending truths. He aimed to show that this view of the
nature of reason is mistaken, that reason is one and the same in all
thinking subjects, that it is universal and infinite, and that thinking
(Denken) is not an activity performed by the individual, but
rather by “the species” acting through the
individual. “In thinking,” Feuerbach wrote, “I
am bound together with, or rather, I am one with—indeed, I myself
am—all human beings” (GW I:18).

In the introduction to Thoughts Feuerbach assumes the role
of diagnostician of a spiritual malady by which he claims that modern
moral subjects are afflicted. This malady, to which he does not give a
name, but which he might have called either individualism or egoism, he
takes to be the defining feature of the modern age insofar as this age
conceives of “the single human individual for himself in his
individuality […] as divine and infinite” (GTU
189/10). The principal symptom of this malady is the loss of
“the perception [Anschauung] of the true totality, of
oneness and life in one unity” (GTU 264/66). This loss
Feuerbach finds reflected in three general tendencies of the modern
age: 1) the tendency to regard human history solely as the history of
the opinions and actions of individual human subjects, and not as the
history of humanity conceived as a single collective agent, 2) the
tendency to regard nature as a mere aggregate of “countless
single stars, stones, plants, animals, elements and things”
(GTU 195/14) whose relations to one another are entirely
external and mechanical, rather than as an organic whole the internal
dynamics of which are animated by a single all-encompassing vital
principle, and 3) the tendency to conceive of God as a personal agent
whose inscrutable will, through which the world came into being from
nothing and is continually directed, is unconstrained by rational
necessity.

Feuerbach’s basic objection to the theistic conception of God
and his relation to creation is that, on it, both are conceived as
equally spiritless. Rather than consisting of lifeless matter to
which motion is first imparted by the purposeful action of an external
agent, Feuerbach argues that nature contains within itself the
principle of its own development. It exercises “unlimited
creative power” by ceaselessly dividing and distinguishing its
individual parts from one another. But the immeasurable
multiplicity of systems within systems that results from this activity
constitutes a single organic totality. “Nature is ground
and principle of itself, or—what is the same thing, it exists out
of necessity, out of the soul, the essence of God, in which he is one
with nature” (GTU, 291/86). God, on this view, is
not a skilled mechanic who acts upon the world, but a prolific artist
who lives in and through it.

In Thoughts Feuerbach further argues that the death of
finite individuals is not merely an empirical fact, but also an a
priori truth that follows from a proper understanding of the relations
between the infinite and the finite, and between essence and existence.
Nature is the totality of finite individuals existing in
distinction from one another in time and space. Since to be a
finite individual is not to be any number of other individuals from
which one is distinct, non-being is not only the condition of
individuals before they have begun to exist and after they have ceased
to do so, but also a condition in which they participate by being the
determinate entities that they are. Thus, being and non-being, or
life and death, are equally constitutive of the existence of finite
entities throughout the entire course of their generation and
destruction.

Everything that exists has an essence that is distinct from its
existence. Although individuals exist in time and space, their
essences do not. Essence in general is timeless and unextended.
Feuerbach nevertheless regards it as a kind of cognitive space in which
individual essences are conceptually contained. Real or
three-dimensional space, within which individual things and people
exist in distinction from one another and in temporal succession, he
thinks of as essence “in the determination of its
being-outside-of-itself” (GTU 250/55). In his
being-one, Feuerbach argues, God is everything-as-one, and is, as such,
the universal essence in which all finite essences are “grounded,
contained and conceived [begriffen]” (GTU
241/48).

It is by means of Empfindung or sense experience that
sentient beings are able to distinguish individuals from one another,
including, in some instances, individuals that share the same essence.
The form of experience is temporality, which is to say that whatever is
directly experienced occurs “now,” or at the moment in time
to which we refer as “the present.” Experience, in other
words, is essentially fleeting and transitory, and its contents are
incommunicable. What we experience are the perceivable features
of individual objects. It is through the act of thinking that we are
able to identify those features through the possession of which
different individuals belong to the same species, with the other
members of which they share these essential features in
common.

Unlike sense experience, thought is essentially communicable.
Thinking is not an activity performed by the individual person qua
individual. It is the activity of spirit, to which Hegel famously
referred in the Phenomenology as “ ‘I’ that
is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’”
(Hegel, 1977, 110). Pure spirit is nothing but this thinking activity,
in which the individual thinker participates without himself (or
herself) being the principal thinking agent. That thoughts present
themselves to the consciousness of individual thinking subjects in
temporal succession is due, not to the nature of thought itself, but to
the nature of individuality, and to the fact that individual thinking
subjects, while able to participate in the life of spirit, do not cease
in doing so to exist as corporeally distinct entities who remain part
of nature, and are thus not pure spirit.

A biological species is both identical with and distinct from the
individual organisms that make it up. The species has no
existence apart form these individual organisms, and yet the
perpetuation of the species involves the perpetual generation and
destruction of the particular individuals of which it is
composed. Similarly, Spirit has no existence apart from the
existence of individual self-conscious persons in whom Spirit becomes
conscious of itself (i.e. constitutes itself as Spirit). Just as
the life of a biological species only appears in the generation and
destruction of individual organisms, so the life of Spirit involves the
generation and destruction of these individual persons. Viewed in
this light, the death of the individual is necessitated by the life of
infinite Spirit. “Death is just the withdrawal and
departure of your objectivity from your subjectivity, which is
eternally living activity and therefore everlasting and immortal”
(GTU, 323/111). Arguing thus, Feuerbach urged his
readers to acknowledge and accept the irreversibility of their
individual mortality so that in doing so they might come to an
awareness of the immortality of their species-essence, and thus to
knowledge of their true self, which is not the individual person with
whom they were accustomed to identify themselves. They would then
be in a position to recognize that, while “the shell of death is
hard, its kernel is sweet” (GTU, 205/20), and that the
true belief in immortality is “a belief in the infinity of Spirit
and in the everlasting youth of humanity, in the inexhaustible love and
creative power of Spirit, in its eternally unfolding itself into new
individuals out of the womb of its plenitude and granting new beings
for the glorification, enjoyment, and contemplation of itself”
(GTU, 357/137).

In light of the emphasis placed in his later works on the practical
existential needs of the embodied individual subject, it should be
noted that during his early idealistic phase Feuerbach was strongly
committed to a theoretical ideal of philosophy according to which
contemplation of and submersion in God is the highest ethical
act of which human beings are capable. Whereas in his later works
Feuerbach would seek to compel philosophy “to come down from its
divine and self-sufficient blissfulness in thought and open its eyes to
human misery (GPZ 264/3),” here he spoke
instead of “the painful whimpering of the sick and the last moans
of the dying as victory songs of the species [in which it] celebrates
its reality and victorious lordship over the single phenomenon”
(GTU, 302/ 95).

The understanding of reason as one and universal embodied in the
works discussed in the preceding section also informs the approach
taken by Feuerbach to the history of philosophy in the three previously
mentioned books and a series of lectures that he produced during
the
1830s.[9]
In his lectures on
the history of modern philosophy Feuerbach emphasizes that
philosophical reflection is an activity to which human beings are
driven. The history of the philosophical systems that
this activity has produced, he argues, is conceived only subjectively
and thus inadequately as long as it is regarded as the history of the
opinions of individual thinkers. Because thinking is a
species-activity the philosophical systems that have arisen in the
course of the history of philosophy should be regarded as necessary
standpoints of reason itself. The Idea is not something first produced
by philosophical reflection. Rather, the individual thinker, in
the act of thinking, transcends his individuality and functions as an
instrument or organ through which the Idea actualizes one of its
moments, which is later reproduced in the consciousness of the
historian of philosophy. The activity of the Idea is experienced
subjectively as inspiration (Begeisterung). In producing
itself, the Idea does not pass from nonbeing into being, but rather
from one state of being (being in itself) to another (being for
itself). The Idea produces itself by determining itself, and human
consciousness is the medium of its self-actualization.
“Reason is nothing but the self-activity of the
eternal, infinite idea, whether in art or religion or philosophy, but
this activity is always the activity of the Idea in a particular
determination and thus also at a particular time, for it
is precisely according to the particular determinations of the idea
that enter successively into human consciousness that we differentiate
the periods and epochs of history” (VGP, 11).

The emergence of new philosophical systems results on this view from
a necessity that is both internal and external. Certain philosophical
ideas are only capable of achieving historical expression under
specific historical conditions. Just as it was only possible for
Christianity to appear at that point in history when the ties of family
and nation in Greco-Roman antiquity were dissolved, so it was only
possible for modern philosophy to appear under specific historical
conditions. The beginning of the history of modern philosophy must be
located at the point at which the modern spirit first begins to
distinguish itself from the medieval spirit. The dominant
principle of the medieval period was the Judeo-Christian monotheistic
principle, according to which God is conceived as an omnipotent person
through an act of whose will the material world was created from
nothing (ex nihilo). It is because nature as
conceived from this standpoint is excluded from the divine substance,
according to Feuerbach, that medieval thought showed no interest in the
investigation of nature. It is only where the substantiality of nature
begins to be rediscovered that the spirit of modernity distinguishes
itself from the medieval spirit. This occurs most clearly where matter
comes to be regarded as an attribute of the divine substance, so that
God is no longer conceived of as a being distinct from nature but
rather as the immutable and eternal imminent cause from which the
plenitude of finite shapes in nature pours forth. This happens
first among the nature philosophers of the Italian Renaissance, and
subsequently in the speculative reflections of Jakob Böhme and in
the system of Spinoza. Indeed, it is one distinctive feature of
Feuerbach’s view of the history of modern philosophy that he sees
it begins, not with Descartes, but with the nature philosophers of the
Italian Renaissance. Feuerbach insists upon speculative
significance of Bacon’s philosophy of nature. It is
precisely in subjecting nature to experimentation and thereby to
rational comprehension that spirit raises itself above nature. But
while Feuerbach emphasizes philosophical importance of experience in
modern rediscovery of nature, he nevertheless insists that empiricism
lacks a “principle” of its own. Later he will speak
of the need for an alliance between German metaphysics and
“the anti-scholastic, sanguine principle of French sensualism
and materialism” (VT, 254–255/165).

Feuerbach’s conviction that Christian faith is inimical to
reason and philosophy was strengthened by his own studies of the
history of modern philosophy, especially his studies of Leibniz and
Bayle. His monographs on these figures were written during the
period of controversy following the appearance of Strauss’s
Life of Jesus. Toward the end of the 1830s the Young Hegelians
were increasingly opposed on two fronts, by right-wing Hegelians such
as Friedrich Göschel, who insisted upon the compatibility of
Hegelianism and Protestant orthodoxy, and by representatives of the
so-called “Positive Philosophy,” who, taking their
inspiration from the late Schelling, emphasized the personality of God
as disclosed in the Christian revelation as the supreme metaphysical
principle (cf. Breckman 1999 and Gooch 2011). It is in light of
these developments that, beginning in the Leibniz monograph, Feuerbach
sought increasingly to distinguish from one another, and to demonstrate
the incompatibility of, what he refers to there as “the
philosophical standpoint” and “the theological
standpoint,” respectively. In general, Feuerbach regarded
Leibniz’s theory of monads as an original philosophical position
that offers a genuinely novel conception of substance and an
alternative to the mechanistic-mathematical Cartesian account of
motion, and thus constitutes an organic link in the developmental
sequence of historical philosophical systems. Feuerbach
criticized Leibniz, however, for not having derived the unity or
harmony of the monads from the nature of the monads themselves, and for
appealing instead to a theological representation of God as an alien,
external power who achieves this harmonization miraculously, and hence,
inexplicably.

Feuerbach regards the theological standpoint as
“practical” because it imagines God as a being separate
from the world, upon which he acts according to purposes similar to
those that guide the actions of human beings, rather than conceiving
the world as a necessary, and hence rationally intelligible,
consequence of the divine nature. To be sure, for Leibniz, there
is nothing arbitrary about the divine will. God’s will is
determined by his infinite wisdom and goodness, which compel him to
choose to create the best possible world. But this attempt to
synthesize rational necessity and divine sovereignty remains in
Feuerbach’s view an unacceptable compromise. Like Tycho
Brahe, who sought to combine the Ptolomaic and Copernican astronomies,
Leibniz sought to reconcile the irreconcilable.

Although, considered superficially, Feuerbach’s study of Bayle
is a continuation of the line of inquiry pursued in his earlier
historical monographs, closer observation confirms Rawidowicz’s
observation that this book marks an important turning point in his
intellectual development (Rawidowicz, 1964, 62–62). The book is
full of digressions that go on for many pages without making any
reference to Bayle, which can produce an impression that it lacks a
clearly defined focus. In fact Feuerbach is here moving toward,
and building a case for, a claim that he articulates more explicitly in
succeeding years, namely, that the “practical negation” of
Christianity is a fait accompli insofar as the scientific, economic,
aesthetic, ethical and political values and institutions that are
constitutive of modern European culture are incompatible with the
demands of authentic Christian faith as expressed in the Bible and in
the writings of classical patristic and medieval authors, who are
either indifferent or inimical to the scientific investigation of
nature, the acquisition of wealth, the pursuit of artistic creativity
as an end in itself, and attempts to establish ethical and political
norms on the basis of universally valid rational principles rather than
the authority of revelation or of the Church.

Although the Protestant Reformation, in its rejection of clerical
celibacy, its affirmation of the vocation of the laity, and its
separation of temporal and spiritual authority, resolved the
contradiction between the spirit and the flesh that was characteristic
of medieval Catholicism, Feuerbach argues, it failed to resolve the
contradiction between faith and reason, or theology and
philosophy. Bayle’s historical significance for Feuerbach
consists in his uncompromising exposure of this contradiction, which,
because it was so deeply rooted in Bayle’s own character, he
himself could only resolve by embracing fideism. Feuerbach sought
to further expose this contraction in his 1839 essay, “On
Philosophy and Christianity,” in which he for the first time
publically repudiated the Hegelian claim that philosophy affirms in the
form of conceptual thinking the same truths affirmed by religion in the
form of sensible representations.

In a section of the preface to the second edition of The Essence
of Christianity (1843) that Eliot omitted from her translation
Feuerbach reveals that he had sought in this book to achieve two
things: First, to attack the Hegelian claim for the identity of
religious and philosophical truth by showing that Hegel succeeds in
reconciling religion with philosophy only by robbing religion of its
most distinctive content. Second, “to place the so-called
positive philosophy in a most fatal light by showing that the original
of its idolatrous image of God [Götzenbild] is man, that
flesh and blood belong to personality essentially” (WC,
10–11). Appreciation of each of these objectives requires further
clarification of the historical context in which Feuerbach’s book
appeared, namely one year after the ascension to the Prussian throne of
the Romantic conservative, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, whose inner circle of
advisors consisted of devout aristocrats closely associated with the
neo-Pietist Awakening, who felt called to establish a German-Christian
state as a bulwark against the influence of subversive ideas on the
continent. 1840 also saw the death of the Prussian minister of
culture, Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein, who had been a supporter of the
Hegelian cause, and a bearer of the hopes of the Young Hegelians both
for academic advancement and for a Prussian state informed by a liberal
Protestant ethos amenable to progress in the arts and sciences.
The wedge driven by the outcry surrounding the appearance of
Strauss’s book between the right and left wings of the Hegelian
camp made this “center” position increasingly
untenable. The policies of Altenstein’s successor were
aimed instead at slaying the “dragonseed” of Hegelian
pantheism in the universities under Prussian jurisdiction.

By the time Feuerbach published his most famous book, The
Essence of Christianity (1841), in which he sought to develop
“a philosophy of positive religion or revelation”
(WC, 3), he had begun to move away from his earlier idealistic
pantheism. That he nevertheless sought in this book to criticize
both Hegelian speculative theology and the positive philosophy from
“the same standpoint” taken by Spinoza in his
Theologico-Political Treatise (VWR, 16/ 9;
cf. WC, 10–11) has often been overlooked. At one point
in the Treatise Spinoza observes that the biblical authors
“imagined God as ruler, legislator, king, merciful, just, etc.,
despite the fact that all the latter are merely attributes of human
nature and far removed from the divine nature” (Spinoza 2007,
63). In Christianity Feuerbach makes a similar
distinction between the metaphysical and personal divine
predicates. God considered as the theoretical object of rational
reflection, or “God as God,” is a timeless and impassible
entity that is unaffected by human suffering and ultimately
indistinguishable from reason itself. “The consciousness of
human nullity that is bound up with consciousness of this being is in
no way a religious consciousness; it is much more characteristic of
skeptics, materialists, naturalists and pantheists” (WC,
89/ 44). It is God’s personal predicates that concern the
religious believer, for whom God exists, not as an object of
theoretical contemplation, but of feeling, imagination, and prayerful
supplication.

Whereas the metaphysical predicates, which “serve only as
external points of support to religion” (WC, 62/25), can
be thought of as ones that apply to the first person of the Trinity
(i.e. God in his abstract universality), the second person of the
Trinity, by virtue of his having subjected himself for the salvation of
humanity to a humble birth and an ignominious death, “is the
sole, true, first person in religion” (WC,
106/51). The doctrine of the Incarnation, Feuerbach argues
against Hegel, is for the Christian believer not a symbolic
representation of the eternal procession and return of infinite spirit
into, and back from, its finite manifestations, but rather “a
tear of divine compassion [Mitleid]” (WC,
102/50), and, as such, the act of a sacred heart that is able to
sympathize with human suffering. That God was compelled by his
love for humanity to renounce his divinity and become human Feuerbach
takes as proof that “Man was already in God, was already
God himself, before God became man” (ibid.), i.e., that
belief in divine compassion involves the attribution or projection onto
God of a moral sentiment that can only be experienced by a being
capable of suffering, which “God as God” is not.

The Essence of Christianity is divided into two
parts. In the first part Feuerbach considers religion “in
its agreement with the human essence” (WC, 75), arguing
that, when purportedly theological claims are understood in their
proper sense, they are recognized as expressing anthropological, rather
than theological, truths. That is, the predicates that religious
believers apply to God are predicates that properly apply to the human
species-essence of which God is an imaginary representation. In
the second part Feuerbach considers religion “in its
contradiction with the human essence” (WC, 316), arguing
that, when theological claims are understood in the sense in which they
are ordinarily taken (i.e. as referring to a non-human divine person),
they are
self-contradictory.[10]
In early 1842 Feuerbach still preferred that
his views be presented to the public under the label
“anthropotheism” rather than “atheism”
(GW, v. 18, 164), emphasizing that his overriding purpose in
negating “the false or theological essence of religion” had
been to affirm its “true or anthropological essence,” i.e.
the divinity of man.

Feuerbach begins The Essence of Christianity by proposing
that, since human beings have religion and animals don’t, the key
to understanding religion must be directly related to whatever it is
that most essentially distinguishes human beings from animals.
This, he maintains, is the distinctive kind of consciousness that is
involved in the cognition of
universals.[11]
A being endowed with such
“species-consciousness” is able to take its own essential
nature as an object of thought. The capacity for thought is
conceived here as the capacity to engage in internal dialogue, and thus
to be aware of oneself as containing both an I and a Thou (a generic
other), so that, in the act of thinking, the human individual stands in
a relation to his species in which non-human animals, and human beings
qua biological organisms, are incapable of standing. When a human
being is conscious of himself as human, he is conscious of himself not
only as a thinking being, but also as a willing and a feeling
being. “The power of thinking is the light of knowledge
[des Erkenntnis], the power of the will is the energy of
character, the power of the heart is love” (WC,
31/3). These are not powers that the individual has at his
disposal. They are rather powers that manifest themselves
psychologically in the form of non-egoistic species-drives
(Gattungstriebe) by which individuals periodically find
themselves overwhelmed, especially those poets and thinkers in whose
works the species-essence is most clearly instantiated.
[12]
Such manifestations include
the experiences of erotic and platonic love; the drive to knowledge;
the experience of being moved by the emotion expressed in music; the
voice of conscience, which compels us to moderate our desires to avoid
infringing on the freedom of others; compassion; admiration; and the
urge to overcome our own moral and intellectual limitations. The
latter urge, Feuerbach contends, presupposes an awareness that our
individual limitations are not limitations of the
species-essence, which functions thus as the norm or ideal toward which
the individual’s efforts at self-transcendence are directed.

The individual human being is limited both physically and
morally. Our physical existence is limited in time and
space. We are also limited—and often painfully aware of our
being so—in our intellectual and moral capacities. But I
only experience as a painful limitation my inability do be and do
things that others of my kind are able to be and to do, so that in
recognizing my own limitations I simultaneously recognize that they are
not limitations of the species. If they were, either I would not
be aware of them at all, or I would not experience my awareness of them
as painful. For example, I only reprove myself for cowardice
because I am aware of the bravery of others, which I myself lack.
I only reprove myself for my stinginess because of my awareness of the
generosity of others, which I myself lack. The experience of
conscience—taken in the broad sense as an awareness of
one’s moral and intellectual shortcomings and
inadequacies—presupposes species-consciousness in the sense of an
awareness of the qualities that one finds oneself lacking but can
imagine oneself under other circumstances possessing.

Feuerbach’s central claim in The Essence of
Christianity is that religion is an alienated form of human
self-consciousness insofar as it involves the relation of human beings
to their own essence as though to a being distinct from
themselves. Although, in developing this claim, Feuerbach was
clearly influenced by Hegel’s account of Unhappy Consciousness in
the Phenomenology, Ameriks’ contention that
“Feuerbach’s philosophical doctrines […] can be
understood as little more than a filling out of the details of
Hegel’s scathing account of orthodox Christianity as a form of
‘unhappy consciousness’” (Ameriks 2000, 259) is
problematic for several reasons. First, it overlooks the
likelihood of Hegel’s having understood his analysis of Unhappy
Consciousness to apply to the otherworldliness he associated with
medieval Catholicism, or perhaps to otherworldly religion more
generally, but not in any case to the type of Protestantism that he
regarded as “the religion of the modern age” (Hegel, 1977,
14), and in which he found the sacred and the secular reconciled.
Second, it overlooks the fact that Feuerbach’s
appropriation of themes found in Hegel’s account of Unhappy
Consciousness occurs in the context of an explicit, albeit incomplete,
repudiation of Hegel’s philosophy of spirit. Unlike Hegel,
who conceives of Unhappy Consciousness as a moment in the development
of human self-consciousness that is also a moment in the
coming-to-be-for-itself of the absolute, Feuerbach has by this time
reached the conclusion that one cannot distinguish absolute spirit from
“subjective spirit or the essence of man” without, in the
end, continuing to occupy “the old standpoint of theology”
(VT, 246–247). Third, it overlooks the significance of
Feuerbach’s emphasis on the importance for grasping the essence
of religion of precisely those subjective aspects of religious
consciousness (imagination and feeling) that Hegel himself regarded as
inessential or of secondary importance. Finally, in connection
with this third point, it overlooks the significance of
Feuerbach’s agreement with Spinoza against Hegel that
“faith […] requires not so much truth as piety”
(Spinoza 2007, 184).

In a short essay published 1842, in which he sought to clarify the
difference between his own approach to the philosophy of religion and
Hegel’s, Feuerbach suggested that this difference is most evident
in the relations in which each of them stands to Schleiermacher, who
famously defined religion as the feeling of utter dependence.
Whereas Hegel had “rebuked” Schleiermacher for abdicating
the truth-claims of the Christian faith by taking the articles of faith
as expressions of this feeling, Feuerbach says he does so only because
Schleiermacher was prevented by his “theological prejudice”
from drawing the unavoidable conclusion that, “if feeling is
subjectively what religion is chiefly about, then God is objectively
nothing but the essence of feeling” (B, 230).
These comments fail to acknowledge that, in The Essence of
Christianity Feuerbach had conceived of God as an alienated
projection of the human species-essence, which was said to include not
only feeling, but reason and will, as well. They nevertheless
reflect Feuerbach’s generally overlooked deployment against Hegel
of resources derived from the philosophies of feeling of Schleiermacher
and
Jacobi,[13]
and they
indicate the direction in which his thinking about religion continued
to move after the publication of The Essence of Christianity,
namely, away from an emphasis on species-consciousness conceived along
Hegelian lines, and toward what Van Harvey has aptly referred to as the
“naturalist-existentialist” themes that predominate in his
later writings on religion (cf. Harvey 1995).

In the years following the appearance of The Essence of
Christianity Feuerbach published two short philosophical
manifestos, the “Preliminary Theses for the Reformation of
Philosophy” (1842) and the Principles of the Philosophy of
the Future (1843), in which he called for a radical break with the
tradition of modern speculative thought. In Principles
he locates the origin of this tradition in the Cartesian philosophy,
and specifically in “the abstraction from the sensuous
[Sinnlichkeit], from matter” (GPZ, 275/ 13)
through which the conception of the cogito first arose. Much of
the content of Principles consists of a truncated survey of
the history of modern philosophy, which purports to trace through a
number of dialectical inversions a necessary development from the
rationalistic theism of Descartes and Leibniz through the pantheism of
Spinoza to the idealism of Kant and Fichte, culminating in
Hegel’s philosophy of identity. What this survey is primarily
intended to show is that the fundamental tendency of this development
has been toward the actualization and humanization of God or,
alternatively, toward “the divinization of the
real, of the materially existent—of
materialism, empiricism, realism, humanism—[and] the negation of
theology” (GPZ, 285/ 22). This survey is followed by a
short “demonstration” of the historical necessity of the
new philosophy, which takes the form of a critique of Hegel, and by the
enumeration of several doctrines that distinguish the new philosophy
from the old.

Whereas earlier rationalists had conceived of God as being entirely
distinct from nature and possessing perfect knowledge untainted by
materiality, and had furthermore “placed the effort and labor of
abstraction and of self-liberation from the sensuous only in
themselves,” Feuerbach notes that Hegel was the first to
transform “this subjective activity into the self-activity of the
divine being,” so that, like the heroes of pagan antiquity, God
(or the Idea) must “fight through virtue for his divinity,”
and only comes to be for himself (or itself) at the end of a long and
laborious process (GPZ, 296/32). This process, as it is
described by Hegel at the end of the Science of Logic,
involves the logical Idea “freely releas[ing] itself
… [into] the externality of space and time existing
absolutely on its own without the moment of subjectivity” (Hegel,
1969, 843). What Feuerbach refers to as “the liberation of
the absolute from matter” is achieved as spirit gradually
distinguishes itself from nature before attaining to the awareness of
itself as absolute. Here, Feuerbach notes, “matter is
indeed posited in God, that is, it is posited as God,” and to
posit matter as God is to affirm atheism and materialism, but insofar
as the self-externalization of the Idea in nature is superseded in the
course of the coming-to-be-for-itself of the Idea in the forms of
subjective, objective and absolute spirit, this negation of
“theology” (i.e. of God conceived as an immaterial being
distinct from nature) is negated in turn. Hegel’s
philosophy thus represents, for Feuerbach, “the last magnificent
attempt to restore Christianity, which was lost and wrecked, through
philosophy … by identifying it with the negation of
Christianity” (GPZ, 297/34).

Whereas the claim for the identity of thought and being was the
cornerstone of the Hegelian philosophy in which Feuerbach finds the
“old” philosophy perfected, one of the most characteristic
features of the new philosophy is its rejection of this claim.
Because the concept of pure being with which Hegel begins the Logic is
an abstraction, Feuerbach argues, in the end Hegel succeeds only in
reconciling thought with the thought of being, and not with being
itself. The new philosophy affirms that being is distinct from,
and prior to, thought, and that it is as various as is the panoply of
individually existing beings, from which it cannot be intelligibly
distinguished. “Thought comes from being, but being does
not come from thought” (VT 258/168). To say that
something exists in actuality, Feuerbach maintains, is to say that it
exists not only as a figment of someone’s imagination, or as a
mere determination of their consciousness, but that it exists for
itself independently of consciousness. “Being is something
in which not only I but also others, above all also the object itself,
participate” (GPZ 304/40). In affirming the
distinction between being and thought, and that nature exists through
itself, independently of thought, the new philosophy also affirms the
reality of time and space, and that real existence is finite,
determinate, corporeal existence.

The old philosophy conceived of the cogito as “an abstract and
merely a thinking being to whose essence the body does not
belong” (GPZ, 319–320/ 54). The new philosophy, by
contrast, affirms that, as a thinking subject, “I am a real,
sensuous being and, indeed, the body in its totality is my ego, my
essence itself” (ibid.). Although it remains unclear just
what Feuerbach could mean in claiming that “the body in its
totality is my ego,” elsewhere he says that to affirm that the
ego is corporeal “has no other meaning than that the ego is not
only active but also passive … [and that] the passivity of the
ego is the activity of the object” in such a way that “the
object belongs to the innermost being of the ego” (AP,
150/142). Object and ego are, to use a Heideggerian term,
gleichursprunglich or “equiprimordial.”
“It is through the body that the ego is not just an ego but also
an object. To be embodied is to be in the world; it means to have
so many senses, i.e. so many pores and naked surfaces. The body
is nothing but the porous ego” (AP 151/143).

If philosophical thought is to avoid remaining “a prisoner of
the ego,” Feuerbach insists, it “must begin with its
antithesis, with its alter ego” (AP,
146/138). The antithesis of thought is sensation. Whereas
in thinking it is the object that is determined by the thinking
activity of the subject, in sense experience, he maintains, without
much argument and with apparently little concern for the
epistemological problems that preoccupied the British empiricists and
Kant, the consciousness of the subject is determined by the activity of
the object, which functions thus as a subject in its own right.
What makes it possible for the ego to posit the object is only that, in
positing the object as something distinct from itself, the ego is at
the same time posited by the object. If, however, the “the
object is not only something posited, but also (to continue in this
abstract language) something which itself posits, then it is clear that
the presuppositionless ego, which excludes the object from itself and
negates it, is only a presupposition of the subjective ego against
which the object must protest” (AP, 147/ 139).

It is not to the I, but to the not-I within the I, that real,
sensuous objects are given. Memory is what first enables us to
transform objects of sense experience into objects of thought, so that
what is no longer present to the senses can nevertheless be present to
consciousness. In doing so it allows us to transcend the
limitations of time and space in thought, and to construct from a
multitude of distinct sense experiences a conception of the universe as
a whole, and of our relations to the various other beings that exist in
it. Feuerbach continues to affirm that, unlike the animals,
“man” is a universal, cosmopolitan being, but he now
maintains that we need not ascribe to human beings any unique
supersensible faculty in order to affirm this truth, since
“wherever a sense is elevated above the limits of particularity
and its bondage to needs, it is elevated to an independent and
theoretical significance and dignity; universal sense is intelligence
[Verstand]; universal sensibility, mind
[Geistigkeit]” (GPZ 336/69). What distinguishes
humans from the animals is not their possession of non-natural powers
either of reason or volition, but the fact that human beings are
“absolute sensualists” whose powers of observation and
recollection extend to the whole of nature.

As Rawidowicz (1964, 113) and Ascheri (1964, 62) have both observed,
the break with the speculative tradition that Feuerbach signals in the
“Preliminary Theses” and in Principles corresponds
to a notable change in his evaluation of religion. In his
polemical essays of the late 1830s and in The Essence of
Christianity Feuerbach had unfavorably contrasted the
“egoistic,” practical standpoint of religion, which he
associated with the unrestricted subjectivity of feeling
(Gemüt) and imagination (Phantasie), with the
theoretical standpoint of philosophy, which he associated with reason
and objectivity. At the end of Principles, however, he informs
his readers that the new philosophy, without ceasing to be theoretical,
nevertheless has a fundamentally practical tendency, and that in this
respect it “assumes the place of religion” and “is in
truth itself religion” (GPZ, 341/73). This line of
thought is developed somewhat further in an unpublished manuscript
where Feuerbach observes that, in order to replace religion, philosophy
must itself become religion in the sense that “it must, in a way
suited to its own nature, incorporate the essence of religion or the
advantage that religion possesses over philosophy” (NV,
123/148).

Two short books on religion that Feuerbach published in the years
following the appearance of Principles suggest that he took
the advantage that religion possesses over the “old”
philosophy to consist in its acknowledgement of “the truth and
essentiality of sensuousness” (GW, v. 10, 187), and of
the importance of corporeal finitude for human psychology. In the
foreword to the first volume of his collected works, which appeared in
1846, Feuerbach acknowledged that in The Essence of
Christianity his emerging commitment to sensuousness remained
wedded to the emphasis on species-consciousness, which, as noted
earlier, was characteristic of his early, idealistic pantheism.
It was only in the course of further investigations of religion pursued
in 1844–45 that Feuerbach felt he had finally been able to break
decisively with his Hegelian
past.[14]
Whereas previously he had summed up his
“doctrine” in the slogan “theology is
anthropology,” by the end of the 1840s Feuerbach had
augmented this slogan to include anthropology “and
physiology” (VWR, 28/21). The Essence of Faith
According to Luther (1844) and The Essence of Religion
(1845) are thus important not only for the changes they represent in
Feuerbach’s approach to religion, but also because it was in the
course of these investigations that he came to define, to the limited
extent that he succeeded in doing so, the terms of the philosophical
anthropology with which he hoped to replace the “old”
philosophy of spirit.

Feuerbach’s espousal of sensuousness coincides with a movement
toward nominalism that is reflected in a shift of emphasis from the
human species to the individual human being in his later works on
religion. One way that this shift shows itself is in a striking
change in Feuerbach’s estimation of egoism. Whereas, in
The Essence of Christianity, he had contrasted the egoism and
intolerance of faith (which he associated with the false, theological
essence of religion) with the altruism and universality love (which he
associated with the true, human essence of religion), in the Luther
book Feuerbach emphasizes that faith in God is faith in a God who loves
human beings, and he now interprets this faith as an indirect form of
human self-affirmation. In faith, the believer affirms the
existence of, as well as his or her confidence in, the goodness of God,
who has promised him or her blessedness or freedom from the painful
limitations of mortality. “Only a being who loves man and
desires his happiness [Seligkeit] is an object of human
worship, of religion” (VWR 71/60). The gods are
the objects of worship and the recipients of sacrifice because they are
the benefactors of human beings in the specific sense that they are
imagined to have it in their power to satisfy fundamental human wishes,
including the wish not to die.

In what seems to be a significant departure from, and not simply a
supplement to, the theory of religion presented in The Essence of
Christianity, where God was interpreted as an imaginary projection
of the human species-essence, the central premise of The Essence of
Religion is that the subjective ground of religion is the feeling
of dependence (Abhängigkeitsgefühl), and that the
original object of this feeling is nature, which Feuerbach defines at
one point as “the sum of all the sensuous forces, things, and
beings that man distinguishes from himself as other than human …
[including] light, electricity, magnetism, air, water, fire, earth,
animals, plants, [and] man insofar as he acts instinctively
[unwillkürlich] and unconsciously” (VWR
104/90).[15]
To say that
human beings are dependent upon nature is to say, among other things,
that nature, which is devoid of consciousness and intention, is what
has caused human beings to exist, and that the same physical processes
that have produced the human brain have also produced human
consciousness. While all organisms are dependent upon nature for
their existence, human beings are distinguished from other organisms by
the extent of their conscious awareness of this dependence, which
Feuerbach finds expressed in the earliest forms of cultic activity,
including especially the offering of sacrifice to divine beings
associated with various aspects of the natural world. To feel
dependent upon something is in some sense to recognize oneself as
distinct from that upon which one is dependent. It is in the
dawning awareness of their dependence upon nature that human beings
first begin to distinguish themselves from nature, without, however,
thereby ceasing to be dependent upon it. The feeling of
dependence in which religion originates is the feeling “that I am
nothing without a not-I which is distinct from me yet
intimately related to me, something other, which is at the
same time my own being” (VWR, 350).

The concept of the feeling of dependence is closely related to two
other concepts that play an equally important role in Feuerbach’s
later writings on religion, namely, “human egoism” and the
Glückseligkeitstrieb or drive-to-happiness.
Feuerbach writes at one point that “the feeling of dependence has
led us to egoism as the ultimate hidden ground of religion. …
Where there is no egoism, there is also no feeling of
dependence” (VWR 91–92/79–80). The conception of
egoism with which Feuerbach is working here, however, is
peculiar. When he speaks of “human egoism,” he tells
us specifically that he is not thinking of the kind of
self-interestedness that he takes to be “the hallmark of the
Philistine and the bourgeois” (VWR 60/50). He is
referring rather to “man’s love for himself, that is, love
of the human essence, the love that spurs him on to satisfy and develop
all the impulses and tendencies without whose satisfaction and
development he neither is nor can be a true, complete human
being” (VWR 61/50). This type of self-love, which
warrants comparison with, but is not the same as, Rousseau’s
amour de soi, encompasses love of one’s fellow human
beings, apart from whom one cannot either cultivate or satisfy the
ethical, intellectual and aesthetic impulses and capacities in which
one’s essential humanity consists, and to whose well-being
one’s own is thus inextricably linked.

Among the many issues that remain unclear in Feuerbach’s later
writings is what the expression “human essence” can mean
for him once he has abandoned the species-ontology of his earlier
writings and declared himself a nominalist. That pivotal question
aside, it is at least clear that in Principles, and in his
later writings on ethics, Feuerbach continues to emphasize the
importance of inter-subjectivity and of the I-Thou relationship, but
that these are no longer conceived in idealistic terms, as they had
been in his earlier writings. Human beings are essentially
communal and dialogical beings, both with respect to our cognitive and
linguistic capacities, and with respect to the range of moral
sentiments we experience toward one another. But the communality
in which the human essence is manifested is now said to be one that
presupposes a real, “sensible” distinction between I and
Thou.

Undoubtedly the central concept in Feuerbach’s last works,
which include the essay, “On Spiritualism and Materialism,
Especially in Relation to the Freedom of the Will,” and an
incomplete essay on ethics, is the concept of the
Glückseligkeitstieb or drive-to-happiness. Toward
the end of the Preliminary Theses, after affirming that all
science must be grounded in nature, and that doctrines not so grounded
remain purely “hypothetical,” Feuerbach had gone on to note
that this is especially true of the doctrine of freedom, and he had
assigned to the new philosophy the task of “naturalizing
freedom” (VT 262/172). This is one of the tasks to
which he applies himself in “On Spiritualism and
Materialism,” where he takes aim at
“supernaturalistic” philosophers, among whom he counts
Kant, Fichte and Hegel, who ascribe to human beings a noumenal or
universal will that is “independent of all natural laws and
natural causes and thus of all sensuous motivations
[Triebfedern]” (SM, 54). In arguing that
it is possible for the will to be determined by the mere form of the
moral law, independently of any sensible inclination, Kant had
identified the will with pure practical reason. In doing so,
Feuerbach argues, he turned the will into a mere abstraction. For
Feuerbach it makes no sense to speak of a timeless will devoid of
affect directed toward some particular object.

The concepts of drive (Trieb), happiness, sensation and
will are closely interrelated in the account of agency that Feuerbach
sought to develop in these last writings. Feuerbach regards
sensation as the “first condition of willing” (M,
366), since without sensation there is no pain or need or sense of lack
against which for the will to strive to assert itself. At one
point he defines happiness as the “healthy, normal” state
of contentment or wellbeing experienced by an organism that is able to
satisfy the needs and drives that are constitutive of its
“individual, characteristic nature and life” (M,
366). The drive-to-happiness is a drive toward the overcoming of
a multitude of painful limitations by which the finite, corporeal
subject is afflicted, which can include “political brutality and
despotism” (VWR, 61/50). Every particular drive is
a manifestation of the drive-to-happiness, and the different individual
drives are named after the different objects in which people seek their
happiness (SM, 70). Among the specific drives to which
Feuerbach refers in his later writings are the
drive-to-self-preservation, the sexual drive, the drive-to-enjoyment,
the drive-to-activity and the drive-to-knowledge. Although he
does not explicitly associate drives with the unconscious, Feuerbach
does anticipate Nietzsche and Freud in regarding the body as the
“ground” of both the will and of consciousness (SM, 153),
and he emphasizes that action results from the force with which a
dominant drive succeeds in subduing other conflicting drives that may
reassert themselves under altered circumstances (SM,
91). Feuerbach also occasionally distinguishes between healthy
and unhealthy drives, though he has little to say about how these are
to be distinguished.

Whereas happiness involves the experience of a sense of contentment
on the part of a being that is able to satisfy the drives that are
characteristic of its nature, the inability to satisfy these drives
results in various forms of discontent, aggravation, pain and
frustration. The German word “Widerwille”
means disgust or repugnance, but literally it involves not-wanting or,
etymologically, “willing against,” and this, Feuerbach
contends, is the most rudimentary form of willing. “Every
malady (Übel), every unsatisfied drive, every unassuaged
longing, every sense of absence [i.e. of a desired object] is an
irritating or stimulating injury and negation of the drive-to-happiness
innate in each living and sensing being, and the countervailing
affirmation of the drive-to-happiness, accompanied by representations
and consciousness, is what we call ‘will’” (M, 367).
Freedom of the will, as Feuerbach conceives of it here, is freedom from
the evils (Übeln) by which my drive-to-happiness is
restricted, and is contingent upon the availability to me of the
specific means required for overcoming these restrictions.

Another way that Feuerbach seeks to “naturalize freedom”
is by developing a naturalistic account of conscience according to
which the voice of conscience, which imposes restrictions on my own
drive-to-happiness, functions in doing so as the advocate for the
drive-to-happiness of “the I apart from me, the sensuous
Thou” (SM 80), who has been or stands to be harmed by
those actions from which I can have a moral obligation to refrain from
performing. Where there is no harm or benefit, Feuerbach
contends, there is no criterion for distinguishing right from wrong
(SM, 75–76). Feuerbach agrees with Schopenhauer in
regarding compassion (Mitleid) as a basic source of moral
motivation, but rejects Schopenhauer’s association of compassion
with the renunciation of the will to live. The purpose of
morality and law is to harmonize the drive-to-happiness of the various
individual members of a moral community. “My right is the
legal recognition of my own drive-to-happiness, my duty is the
drive-to-happiness of the other that demands recognition from me”
(SM, 74). The moral will, as Feuerbach conceives of it here,
is not a disinterested will. It is rather “that will which
seeks to cause no harm because it wishes to suffer no harm”
(SM, 80), and has come to identify its own interests with
those of others. Because sympathy for the suffering of others
presupposes antipathy toward my own suffering, whoever does away with
self-interest (i.e. refuses to recognize moral value in actions
motivated by self-interest) does away at the same time with compassion
(Mitleid).

References to Feuerbach’s published writings are to the
critical edition of his collected works or GesammelteWerke (hereafter GW) edited by Werner Schuffenhauer,
Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1981-. Feuerbach’s writings are
cited in the text using the following system of abbreviation. Page
numbers refer to the relevant volume of GW as indicated
below. In cases where two page numbers are separated by a slash,
the second refers to the relevant translation as indicated below.
Although I have made use of these translations, in many cases I have
preferred to provide my own.

“Grundsätze der Philosophie: Notwendigkeit einer
Veränderung” (date uncertain),
in
Feuerbach,
1996, 119–135 = “The Necessity of a Reform of Philosophy,”
in FB, 145–152. This unpublished manuscript
is not included in any of the volumes of
GW that have appeared to date.

Ameriks, K., 2000, “The Legacy of Idealism in the Philosophy
of Feuerbach, Marx, and Kierkegaard,” in The
Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, K. Ameriks (ed.), Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 258–281.

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